It is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth. Yet the issues traditionally addressed under that term have not disappeared. Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and knowledge and the validity of cultural interpretation have intensified. Lambert Zuidervaart challenges intellectual fashions. He proposes a new critical hermeneutics of artistic truth that engages with both analytic and continental philosophies and illuminates the contemporary cultural scene. People turn to the arts as a way of finding orientation in their lives, communities and institutions. But philosophers, hamstrung by their own theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of authenticity, significance and integrity prevail. Understood in this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value of the arts.

Nietzsche had a particular interest in the relationship between art and life, and in art's contribution to his philosophical aims—to identify the conditions of the affirmation of life, cultural renewal, and exemplary human living. These new essays demonstrate that understanding his engagement with art is essential for understanding his philosophy.

This is Volume II of three in a collection on Aesthetics. Originally published in 1969, this volume of the Muirhead library of philosophy. After distinguishing, and relating, the functions of Criticism and Aesthetics in Part I, Part II develops the basic thesis of the book, which is that the central defining characteristic of the aesthetic is 'embodiment' rather than 'expression'. Part III tests this out in examples from the different arts, 'representative' and 'abstract', with very special attention to music (as an 'abstract' art), in which the problem of art's apparently contradictory characters-of being both autonomous and yet expressive of life outside art-is seen in its most acute form. Part IV is a philosophical analysis of the main concepts so far involved-meaning, symbolism, knowledge, truth, standards-in art as distinct from other, discursive knowledge. It concludes with a discussion of the question whether art is in any sense a 'revelation'. Part V considers the bearing of the arguments of the book on aesthetic education.